Podcasts · Religion & Spirituality
Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies
Bishop Robert Barron
300 episodes
A weekly homily podcast from Bishop Robert Barron, produced by Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.
Episodes page 4 of 6
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The Voice of One Crying Out in the Desert
Friends, for this Third Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to focus on John the Baptist, who of course is one of the great Advent figures. It’s as though John stands on a kind of frontier or border: all of the human…
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Confronting the Powers That Be
Friends, great writers, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Melville, put a lot into their opening line, which often sets the tone for the whole work. This week we have the privilege of hearing the very opening of the…
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You Can’t Save Yourself
Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent—the liturgical new year. I've said this before, but Advent is a time to get back to basics. Can I suggest we start with that familiar Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come,…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: The One True King
Friends, Christ is the King of all things. His rule is characterized not by totalitarianism or despotism, but rather by loving kindness and sacrifice. He constantly reaches out his hands to defend the weak and sick,…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: The Enemy of Melancholy
Friends, we must develop a theology and spirituality of work. Meaningful labor awakens our desire to collaborate in God’s creativity. Viewing work in this way—as spiritual and moral action—conquers our melancholy,…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: You Must Rethink Your Spiritual Life
Friends, there’s a great temptation for us to turn the Lord into a distant spiritual entity or a difficult moral taskmaster. We incorrectly believe that we have to crawl our way to the divine by our own heroism, merit,…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: Your Life is Not About You
Friends, there’s only one real sadness in life—not to be a saint. But what does it mean to follow this path of righteousness? To follow the will of God, and God wills that we habitually direct our actions and thoughts…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: God’s Rules for Life
Friends, the Books of Moses teach that the three types of Israelite law—liturgical law, ritual law, and moral law—shape and direct God’s people toward holiness and purity. While the liturgical laws have been carried…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: Does It Matter What You Believe?
Friends, a great theme of the Bible is that of God’s chosen people. At the same time, we also see that God’s salvific plan has to do with all of humanity—and indeed with all of creation. God chooses Israel—and the New…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: The Summit of the Christian Life
Friends, the mountain is a great image throughout the Bible. It is the place where we go up and where God comes down to meet us. Today’s first reading from Isaiah orients us to three holy mountains of the Lord: first,…
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Classic Sunday Sermons: The Key to Human Flourishing
Friends, in biblical imagery, the vineyard symbolizes the people of God. The Lord nourishes us as our caretaker, but he desires (even demands) that we bear good fruit. The Mass, the Eucharist, the teaching office of…
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Classic Sunday Sermon: Becoming a Brick Wall of Integrity
Friends, our own wickedness and virtue belong to oneself. Though our communities and background stories affect our mind and will, nevertheless, the individual stands alone in the presence of God. We show God and the…
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How Not to Think About Heaven
Friends, the parable at the heart of our Gospel today from Matthew 20 is one of those passages in the New Testament that really bothers people. It proves that this parable is not just conveying correct information…
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Enter the Adventure
Friends, today in our second reading, St. Paul says, “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or…
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Are We Saved by Faith Alone?
Friends, they say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Well, today I’m going to rush in to some stormy waters by looking at the central issue of the Protestant Reformation: this issue of faith and works, or…
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A Fire in the Heart
Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the twentieth chapter of Jeremiah. There is so much spiritual wisdom in Jeremiah, but more than any of the other prophets, we come to know his personality and his…
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When God’s Ways Are Confusing
Friends, I do a lot of debating and dialoguing with agnostics and atheists, and very often, when they attack the faith, it's along the lines of: How could an all-knowing and all-good God allow (fill in the blank)? Why…
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Chosen for the Sake of the World
Friends, our Gospel today from Matthew 15, the famous story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, is one of those Gospels that bothers and unnerves people. How should we read it? It is not that Jesus was grouchy after…
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In the Storm? Look to Christ
Friends, our Gospel for today is Matthew’s account of the calming of the storm and the walking on the water. This is an event that reached very deeply into the hearts and minds of the first Christians: we can find an…
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The True King Has Come
Friends, it’s a wonderful grace that the Feast of the Transfiguration this year falls on Sunday. The first reading the Church gives us from the seventh chapter of the book of Daniel might strike you as curious, but…
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A Wise and Discerning Heart
Friends, our first reading is from the First Book of Kings, and it's one of my favorite passages in the entire Old Testament. If you're going on a retreat, spending a Holy Hour, or just wanting to get in touch with the…
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The Parasite of Evil
Friends, we are reading during these weeks of summer from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which contains many of the great parables of Jesus. But I want to focus just on one today because it’s so rich both…
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God Has Spoken; Are You Listening?
Friends, our first reading and our Gospel today are about the word of God, both from God’s side as he speaks, and then from our side as we receive. God has spoken through creation, the prophets, the Scriptures—and, in…
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Enter the Inner Life of God
Friends, the Gospel for this weekend from the eleventh chapter of Matthew contains a passage that has been called “Matthew’s most precious pearl.” “No one knows the Son except the Father,” Jesus exclaims, “and no one…
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You Can’t Be Neutral About Jesus
Friends, there is no religious figure anywhere in the religions or philosophies of the world who is stranger, more demanding, more relentless, and more unnerving than Jesus. And therefore the religion attached to Jesus…
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Be Not Afraid
Friends, the readings for today are really magnificent, and they are all about something central to the spiritual life—namely, fear. Years ago, I was on a retreat, and the retreat director said that there are two basic…
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Shepherds, Warriors, Healers
Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about vocations—specifically, vocations to the priesthood. Our Gospel for today from Matthew shows us the call of the priest: to be a shepherd of lost sheep, a…
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Food for the Hungry Heart
Friends, we come now to the marvelous Feast of Corpus Christi, of the Body and Blood of Christ. What has been on my mind a lot recently is the famous story of the feeding of the five thousand—the only miracle, with the…
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To the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit
Friends, today we come to Trinity Sunday, which has been called “the preacher’s nightmare.” But as you probably know from previous sermons of mine, I don’t agree with that at all. I think every Sunday is Trinity…
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Surrender to the Spirit
Friends, we come to the great Feast of Pentecost—the feast, par excellence, of the Holy Spirit. A critique of the Western Church is that we don’t speak sufficiently of the third person of the Trinity, and there might…
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Why Did Jesus Ascend to Heaven?
Friends, right at the end of the Easter season and in anticipation of Pentecost, we come to the great Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. We should do a theological reflection on this feast—how we should and shouldn’t…
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What Are the Signs of the Holy Spirit?
Friends, on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us a kind of foretaste of Pentecost. In all three readings, we hear descriptions of the work of the Holy Spirit—the animating principle of the Mystical Body.…
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Be a Holy Priesthood
Friends, there is an enormously important line in our first reading today that we might just pass over: “The number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient…
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How to Proclaim the Faith
Friends, for this fourth Sunday of Easter, we have a magnificent first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It’s one of Peter's great kerygmatic speeches—the kerygma means the basic proclamation of the faith—and a…
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When You’re Walking the Wrong Way
Friends, we come to this Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel is Luke’s account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. This masterpiece is a summation of the spiritual life, and it starts with two disciples of Jesus…
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Agents of Divine Mercy
Friends, we continue our celebration of the Easter season on this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday. Mercy, St. Thomas Aquinas says, is compassion in regard to someone else’s suffering; thus, God’s mercy is…
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Let Christianity Be Weird!
Friends, Happy Easter! Christ is risen—Alleluia, Alleluia! Recently, I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom Holland. Someone from the crowd asked him, “What’s the call of our time?” and he said,…
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All the Way Down
Friends, on Palm Sunday, the culminating point of Lent, the Church reads from one of the great Passion narratives from the synoptic Gospels. But I want to look at the second reading today—a passage from the second…
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Is Death the End?
Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, our Gospel is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Let’s face it: we are all haunted by death. No matter what we accomplish in this life, we know that it will all…
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I Was Blind and Now I See
Friends, on this fourth Sunday of Lent, our Gospel is one of the most magnificent stories in the Gospel of John: the healing of the man born blind. John is a theological master, of course, but also a literary master,…
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The Thirsty Soul
Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we are again getting back to spiritual basics, and the first reading from Exodus and the Gospel from John both focus on the symbol of water. Water in the Bible can be a negative…
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A Friend of the Lord Jesus
The readings for the Second Sunday of Lent brought to mind my good friend Bishop David O’Connell, who was killed last month. He was one of the most Christ-like people I have ever known—a man of deep spiritual…
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Time to Get Back to Basics
Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, our preparation for Easter. I've often said that Lent is a time to get back to basics. It’s like when you're starting the football season and have to get back to…
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Love as God Loves
Friends, we continue our reading of the marvelous Sermon on the Mount. We cannot read this sermon as one ethical teaching among many. Everyone from Plato and Aristotle all the way up through Kant and Hegel have a moral…
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Be a Saint!
Friends, we have the privilege of continuing to read from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus himself lays out his basic teaching. What we find today is Jesus as the new Moses. Like Moses, he goes up on a mountain,…
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You Are the Salt of the Earth
Friends, we are reading from the marvelous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. This week, we hear Jesus compare his disciples to three things: the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and a city set on…
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The Key to Happiness
Friends, our Gospel for this Sunday is one of the great passages of the New Testament—namely, the Beatitudes from the fifth chapter of Matthew. "Beatitudo" just means happiness, and the one thing we all want is to be…
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Join Your Life to the Light
Friends, this liturgical year, we are reading from the Gospel of Matthew, and Matthew is written precisely for a Jewish audience. This is why, over and over again, we find Matthew putting Jesus within an Old Testament…
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Behold, the Lamb of God!
Friends, we return this Sunday to Ordinary Time, and the Church gives us a rather extraordinary reading from the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Seeing Jesus, John the Baptist says something that we repeat at…
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Be Attentive to Epiphanies
Friends, we come today to the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek meaning “intense appearance.” It is something that not only gets our attention but also reveals something of enormous…
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